Chris Bohjalian: The door that opened a novel

Sep. 30, 2011

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Chris Bohjalian

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Not too long ago, I was in my basement, which just might be the scariest place on earth. We’re talking “Silence of the Lambs” scary, “Night of the Living Dead” scary, “lions ands tigers and bears, oh my” scary.

It’s not merely that a sizable chunk of the floor is dirt, which means that after a good rain or snow melt some sections become the sort of slop that swallowed humans alive in bad science fiction movies from the 1950s. It’s not the fact that there is a Gordian knot of tubes and pipes along the ceiling (which is little more than a crawlspace in some sections), some of which carry water and some of which carry LP gas to heat the house.

It’s the door.

Along one of the basement foundation walls, below ground, is a door about five and a half feet tall and three feet wide. It’s made of rough, unfinished wooden planks, and was added at some point after the 1898 Victorian above it was first constructed. When my wife and I moved into the house, it was nailed shut. There was a moldy pile of coal beside it, a decomposing little mesa, and so I convinced myself the door was merely a part of an old coal chute. Sure, I never found the exterior entrance to the chute, but that was a detail. Perhaps it was under a porch added at some point in the 1940s.

It would be years after we had moved in that I would finally decide to man up and pull that basement door open. The project demanded a crowbar, pliers, and – at one point – an ax. After hours of toil, behind that door I found ... nothing. There was a slender cubicle the height and width of the door and maybe eighteen inches deep. The walls were made of wood, and behind them was nothing but earth. It in no way resembled a coal chute. It was more like a closet — or a crypt behind which you might wall up a neighbor alive. So, I nailed the door shut and made a mental note to steer clear of that corner of the basement for as long as we lived in the house.

Nevertheless, on some level I understand even then that the basement door was going to lead to a novel. Novelists are asked all the time where our ideas come from, and I have done this long enough that I suspected someday that door would, quite literally, open a novel: “The door was presumed to have been the entry to a coal chute, a perfectly reasonable assumption since a small hillock of damp coal sat moldering before it.”

So begins “The Night Strangers.”

Now, it would take an Airbus ditching one afternoon in the Hudson River, the sky cerulean, before I would begin to understand what was going to exist behind those rough wooden planks. Along with many thousands of other people around the world, I dropped what I was doing on January 15, 2009 so I could watch live on television the rescue of 155 passengers from Chesley Sullenberger’s Flight 1549. I stared enrapt as the jet floated, nose up, in the waters just west of Manhattan, and I knew instantly that the ditching was going to lead to a novel.

That basement door was a gift, and it was only a matter of time before a novel would hinge upon it.